Everything you Need to Know About Video SEO

Have you started to publish video content recently but aren’t seeing the results? It might be because you haven’t optimised your videos for SEO!

Video content is more popular than ever, representing a wonderful opportunity for brands to increase their revenue. Indeed, Adding a video to your landing page can boost your conversion rate by up to 80%. Besides, 64% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy a product or service after watching a video about it.

Yet, with thousands of videos uploaded to the internet every day, your video content needs to be optimised for it to stand out. This will also help you grab your customers’ attention and turn them into loyal advocates. Sounds like what you’re trying to achieve?

Keep reading to find out how video SEO can help your videos stand out and rank higher on search engine results pages.

What is Video SEO? 

Did you know that over 500 hours of video content is uploaded to YouTube (the second largest search engine after Google) every day? Unfortunately, this can make finding your videos tricky for viewers unless you’ve optimised them for search engines!

Video SEO is the process of optimising your videos so that search engines can index them. This, in turn, allows them to rank on the search engine results pages for relevant keyword searches. Therefore, having SEO optimised videos is critical. It will increase the odds of your videos showing up in the search results when people type a keyword relevant to your video content on prevalent search engines such as Google or YouTube.

The main benefit of crafting a powerful video SEO strategy is that it can help you build an audience and increase your brand awareness. This will, in turn, boost your sales without spending money on advertising.

Are Videos Good for SEO?

Regularly publishing insightful and valuable video content can be extremely helpful to improve your SEO. This is also a great way to boost your organic traffic and increase your customer base.

Google Favours Video Content

According to Moovly, a video is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than a traditional webpage.

As a result, adding a video to your landing page or website will significantly boost your SEO efforts, helping you attract new leads and increase your brand awareness.

Note that not all video platforms are created equal. Indeed, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube. And unsurprisingly, some recent studies have shown that most of the videos appearing in the top ten of Google blended search results (88% in fact ) come from YouTube. That’s why you should strive to host your video content on YouTube to boost your SEO strategy and increase your organic traffic. Additionally, as the largest video content platform, posting on YouTube allows you to leverage the giant’s massive user base. After all, over 2 billion people are using the platform monthly across the globe.

Videos are more Appealing to Viewers

Video content is becoming increasingly popular because it’s easily digestible, entertaining, and can help customers relate to a brand better. Indeed, 72% of consumers prefer watching a video about a product rather than reading about it, and 85% of people would like to see more videos from brands. Therefore, a carefully crafted video can help you create a deeper emotional connection with your customers and hook them in.

Now, a recent study revealed that people spend 2.6x more time on pages featuring a video than on pages without videos. And the ‘’average time on page’’ is a key metric for ranking higher in search engines such as Google.

Creating engaging videos can allow you to keep your customers on your page for longer. And the longer viewers watch your videos and stay on your website, the better you’ll rank in search engines!

5 Tips to Optimise your Videos for SEO

Do your Keyword Research

You’ve worked hard on creating a compelling video and are ready to share it with the world. Congratulations! The next step is to do your keyword research. Note that this is a very important step as it will help your video rank better. To find high-performing keywords, you can leverage specific tools such as TubeBuddy, vidIQ, Google Trends, or even use the YouTube search bar and its autosuggest feature. These tools will allow you to quickly scan the most popular keywords related to your content. You’ll then be able to select the best-performing ones.

Optimize your Title and Description

You now have a list of high-performing keywords relevant to your video. It’s time to optimise your video title and description using these words! When a user is looking for a video, the first thing they’ll see when looking at the search result pages is the video title. Therefore, make sure your title is compelling, and your chosen keywords naturally fit into it.

As a bonus tip, we’d also recommend that you keep your title short and sweet. Ideally, you should keep it under 60 character) so it’s not cut off on the result page. The ‘’concise’’ rule applies to your description too. After all, viewers are on the platform to watch a video and not to read long video descriptions. Besides, keep in mind that YouTube will only show the first two or three lines of your description. Viewers will then have to click “show more” to see the rest. Therefore, make sure to include any important links or calls to action in these lines.

Add Subtitles to Your Video

Subtitles contain important keywords and can therefore help your video rank better on search engines. Indeed, a study led by PLYMedia revealed that viewers are 80% more likely to watch a video to completion when it features subtitles. Now, remember, the longer viewers watch your videos, the higher your videos will rank! What’s more, 85%of Facebook videos are watched with the sound off, so adding subtitles is becoming important to hook viewers in and keep them interested enough to come back.

Use a Transcription

Transcripts allow you to transcribe your video’s audio into text content. They’re particularly useful for people who prefer to watch videos on mute for various reasons and provide you with an additional resource across your other marketing channels. Video transcripts are a powerful tool to improve your video SEO efforts as they contain plenty of keywords that search engines can easily scan to determine their relevance based on keyword searches.

Create a Video Sitemap for Video Seo

A video sitemap is an XML file that you’ll find at the root level of your site. Video sitemaps are paramount to a great video SEO strategy as they help search engines find your content easily. But how does it work, you ask?

Google delivers relevant content to viewers using its video index. This index stores millions of videos previously indexed by the search engine. When a user searches for a specific video, the search results are all pulled from this index. When you create a sitemap, you’re providing Google with all the information it needs to find your content (which might not have been discovered otherwise), understand your videos, and make them easy to find in relevant search results.

Therefore, you should always strive to create video sitemaps to help Google find and serve your videos.

We hope that this post has convinced you of the importance of a good video SEO strategy. Follow these tips, and you’ll be on your way to ranking on the first page of Google and YouTube search results in no time.

Set Up A Winning Video Marketing Strategy

At DreamCube, we help businesses take video marketing to the next level.

If you’d like to learn more about which video marketing strategy will work best for your business, or plan your marketing strategy with Video SEO , contact us today.